Lost it: The party’s deputy president, Paul Mashatile, was not amused by the union boo brigade. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Thursday.
The irony in the leaders of the multi-class party whose internal succession battles helped decimate the progressive trade union movement calling for working-class unity in defence of the revolution is so thick that one could put it between two slices of bread and eat it.
Thick, but nowhere near as thick as the skins of the ANC top brass who did so in their addresses to the May Day rallies held around the country on Wednesday, throwing in a call for the votes of members of labour federation Cosatu in return for another five years of the same.
With the exception of the deputy president, Paul Mashatile.
Saint Paul wanted the workers’ votes, but he lost his cool — along with control of the microphone —when the cables were cut during his speech and the boo brigade among the comrades got going.
Accusations of counter-revolution flew from the podium and solidarity with the working class went out the window along with the power supply, which, unlike unity among alliance partners, was restored after a few moments.
Not the outcome the ANC leadership would have wanted, with less than a month to go until voting day, but inevitable at some point in the campaign.
The ANC has been promising its alliance partners a greater say in running the country every five years since 1994.
It failed to deliver — term in, term out — while at the same time gutting the federation and its affiliates by drawing them into the perennial drama over which faction gets to be in charge of the ANC.
It was only a matter of time until Mashatile — or somebody else from the ANC top seven — took fire from the union rank-and-file during this election cycle, with the where and how revealing themselves on Workers’ Day.
The sitting ANC leadership aren’t the only ones bathing in irony this election campaign.
Former president Thabo Mbeki’s first appearance on the campaign trail since Jacob Zuma took his job was as replete with incongruity as the present leadership’s May Day offerings.
Mbeki’s address to the 30 years of democracy celebration at Freedom Park on Monday was an old-school banger: vintage TM1, packed with facts and figures and quotes and references.
For all the so-on-and-so-forthing, it was tedious watching the man under whose watch load-shedding was invented blame it on his successor and his cronies within and outside the ANC.
Likewise his argument that it was Jacob Zuma — and not himself — who first attempted to get the prosecuting authorities (and the intelligence services, for that matter) involved in the ANC’s internal succession battles.
Let (s)he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Mbeki’s characterisation of Zuma’s actions as counter-revolutionary are correct, but his revisionist presentation of what went down in the ANC, and the state, during his years in office is not.
This rewriting of history is central to the ANC’s election campaign — and the image of renewal that it is attempting to project ahead of 29 May. It is the blaming of all of our woes on Nxamalala.
It’s the ANC as a whole — and not an individual who served two terms as its president — who have got us to where we are today.
The irony in Zuma telling the voters that he and the uMkhonto weSizwe party will fix the same South Africa that the old man and Team Gupta helped break during his time in the presidency is just as strong.
The MK party’s electoral list has more dodgy punters in it than Greyville Racecourse on July Day, so uBaba’s undertaking that his new party will end corruption and bring back law and order is as incongruous as the promises it makes in its manifesto.
Ironic, but nowhere near as outlandish as Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen’s Workers’ Day offering.
John wants to cut the national minimum wage in half — it stands at a princely R27 an hour — to ease unemployment and boost our GDP and make South Africa a better country to live in. How this will happen appears a little unclear.
It’s difficult to understand how making already poor people poorer by halving their wage packet — and rendering them more vulnerable to abuse by employers than they presently are — will assist our economic recovery.
It’s also hard to imagine this kind of a policy getting the DA enough votes to take over the country, as it claims it wants to do after election day — by promising to make people’s lives harder, rather than easier, if they come to power.
Perhaps it’s better that way.